Still
Life
I always reassure to myself
the act of plumping a loved one’s goose stuffed pillow fibre that good and
virtuosity will be the ones triumphant in the end. That I do at least a degree
of kindness by making those who are utterly disabled from doing their part, and
in return I might look back on the smiling faces of gratitude, captured in
their allocated frames. The only image I dread is Father’s – a softly focused,
wistful look of bleak terror in the aspect of grey scale. He never wanted another portrait after that
last burst of luminosity and so my family for years were reminded of the
history which could never be unlearned or concealed over and to unmask the
great bogeyman which glared out of the glass sheath. The room from which I
manoeuvre myself from now is the make-shift hospice where my Father can look at
his small organs of pride over the years – commissioned portraits; that was his
speciality. All beautifully engraved canvases of bleak, penetrating shades of
flesh coloured beiges and olive green highlights for the Captain’s tunic. Of
course, fashion was never Father’s concern. It was the face he always captured
best. I remember his words now of “But such detail, my dear. Such exquisite
features of the weariness of life in their lines, and no matter the spectrum of
eye colour, they,” pointing fixedly to his irises, “have their story already
panned out for their carriers. When life starts and when it all ends. It’s the
orbit of our worlds.” Looking in here now, as the soft translucent veil billows
in the wind, and soft hazy sunlight eases itself into the cream dominant walls,
they look down on us as great tormentors of the present, the now. Which is perhaps my father will be
on trial today. You, see it really was the tormentors he captured best.
“Must you have that wretched
guard behind you, Father. I mean, for heaven’s sake, you can’t tell me you wish
to be a condemned man on his…” I paused here. Softly gripping the bridge of my
nose and squeezing my eyes shut from the phrase we both knew to be the unspoken
truth.”
“We’ve spoken of this many
times now, Lucia. I could no longer care if they found me a guilty conspirator
of the guards or not. It will all soon be over.”
Moving swiftly to the brass
plated headboard of the bed, I leaned over to shirk away the grip of the
starring force which looked below on me. Each second I had to look up into its
eyes, the more I felt increasingly powerless against its might. I could feel
Father’s gaze on me, his sullen eyes wide open in his disapproval of my
shameful act. Father never had the courage to shout on us as children. He would
look upon us with the great shame that became so familiar to family life. I
wonder if his subjects ever abused him in the same way when their faces weren’t
captured in such a way.
“My dear…” He whimpered.
“I can’t…I cant!” I bleated, unable to suppress my fear of the force
of the closing looks of hate coming alive in the room. “Send her away!” I could
hear in my mind, the canvas refusing to give up on the resistance below. I gave
up and circled my eyes across the gallery of faces pitched towards me. One even
reminded me of an ex-partner and that just made the reality even worse.
“Why Father? Why must you
keep these murderers beside you. Cold
blooded murders!” I emphasised my last point in defence of the closing
walls. He looked in that picture of innocence he was always so good at. It was
just a job like any other.
“Because they chose me,
that’s why. I survived on the very basis of my talent alone. A talent for
bringing out the best in humanity.” His withered features sunk into the pillow
once more, as the local constable came through the whitewashed door and
immediately placed himself in-front of the fixed tripod with the device on top.
At least there would be no prosecutor, though my Father would be pretty good on
his own in convicting himself of the evidence interspersed across the set he
was in.
“I must ask you to leave
now, miss.” Commanded the young constable. What truth there would be in his
words, I should never know until he was safe in the knowledge we could no
longer reach him. Much like his subjects, I suppose.
*
Just outside the main
reception room which covered the ground floor of the house, I greeted Latoya,
our assigned liaison officer to comfort our rapidly diminishing household. What
was left of those siblings that hadn’t flown the nest was the same one who
cared for the patient in the gallery/death inside now, imparting his evidence.
“You know why we had to do
it, don’t you Lucia?” inquired Latoya. A nice young woman from the Far East.
Emigrated here she says because of the emotional ‘challenges’ of the British
people. British I’m not, she says, but your family is not exactly at peace are
they? It was her on-going joke as she tried to reassure us about the unspoken
horror my Father could yet be responsible for. When we had reached the open
plan combination of the living and dining area, we took opposite seats of the
leather plated stools, she had already planned the careful arrangement of
afternoon tea.
“I don’t understand, though.
What he did was to survive the camp. You don’t expect a man to get very far if
he’s suffering with rheumatoid arthritis do you?” I sounded somewhat
hysterical, like even I couldn’t trust my own words.
“They weren’t just still
life paintings, Lucia. You see…”
“Oh, for God’s sake, that’s
all you people can tell me. Can ‘I see’, ‘do I understand?’ My father will be
dead soon and you come here now, seventy years later to try and unearth some
shocking revelation about him.”
She looked at me with the
doubt of a psychotherapist who has just nipped the cause of the patient’s ills
and was about to exploit it.
“Okay then. I’ll put it
differently. There were portraits of the masses of bodies being tossed into
their communal graves. The beatings of starved prisoners. And if we’ve got our
records right, your father wasn’t the only one behind the camera.”
I sprang from my chair “Stop
it! Just stop it! My father was an
artist, he would never agree to those sort of demands. He was just as much a
prisoner as they all were.”
“Then what are those burnt
fragments of those scorched chips of wood in your loft then, Ms Field? Do any
of them by any chance happen to be part of the lovely wood shavings your mother
had planted in your garden? Is that the expression of your father’s art your
family didn’t want you to see? What a pity your mother had that revolver beside
her…”
Furious as I was, I towered
over her and terrified of the links that once seemed so inexplicable.
“Don’t you ever speak of my
mother in that way!” I shrieked.
I knew Latoya hated our
sort. The sort that liked to keep the truth in images of the dead.
“Well, I suppose that ends
our discussion. But ask yourself this – where do you think the bristles of your
father’s brush came from? They’re much softer than usual nowadays.” She left
then. And the following days, weeks that were to come, I no longer had a
liaison officer.
Only then, after my Father’s
death, did I really understand the love of his beloved men above. They went up
in dust the day after.
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